James Swain - Take Down

Decades later, they were still going strong.

Billy sat in the director’s chair and tried to avoid looking at Ricky’s corpse. Shaz handed him three items off the night table: an iPhone, a light meter, and a small notepad.

“Those are his things,” she said. “Now tell me what the little fucker was up to.”

He examined the iPhone first. There were no text or voice messages, just an e-mail from JetBlue confirming a flight out of town departing Saturday night. He now knew something important: the Gypsies were planning to scam Galaxy’s casino on Saturday afternoon. Cheaters always left town a few hours after ripping off a casino.

The notepad was next, its pages filled with cryptic notations and measurements. When he looked up, Shaz was burning a hole in him.

“Explain the notes,” she said.

“Ricky was measuring the distances to the exits, in case his family needed to beat an escape. Later, he was going to draw everything out, like a blueprint.”

“A blueprint for what?”

“His family practices their scams in a fake casino. They try to duplicate the conditions inside your casino to see what problems might come up.”

“How does the light meter play into this?”

“Ricky was measuring the light inside the casino so his family could duplicate it inside the fake casino. The family videotapes their practice sessions, and later critiques the tapes. It lets them see what the surveillance cameras see.”

The answer seemed to satisfy her. She pulled up a chair, and sat in it backward so she faced him. “You’re a clever guy, aren’t you?”

“If I was so clever, you wouldn’t have caught me.”

“I hear you went to MIT and blew everyone out of the water.”

He stiffened, not knowing what to say.

“I also hear you’ve banged half the beautiful women in Las Vegas. You’re a regular love machine, is what I hear.”

The punishers laughed under their breath.

“It’s why you’re so successful,” she went on. “The girls you recruit won’t give you up, even if they get caught. They’re in love with you.”

The things she had said only a handful of people knew. No one had ever ratted him out before, and he didn’t have a clue who was behind this betrayal.

“So what’s the Gypsies’ scam? You must have figured it out by now,” she said.

She was right. He had figured it out, or at least enough to catch them.

The scam would occur between 3:55 p.m. and 4:05 p.m. Saturday afternoon, right as the day shift ended and the swing shift began. Employees going home, new employees taking over their spots, the casino in a state of flux, no one in surveillance paying attention to the monitors, just the way cheaters liked it.

He also knew what they’d be wearing. Clothes whose colors matched. This was true for every scam the Gypsies had pulled and would be no different come Saturday. Perhaps they’d be posing as a family on vacation, or a group of zany conventioneers who dressed alike.

He also knew that it was an outside job, and that no casino employees would be involved. The Gypsies were a tight-knit group and avoided using outside agents whenever possible.

It was enough information to nail them. But if he told Shaz what he knew, the punishers would ice him. They really didn’t have a choice. He’d seen the stiff in the closet and was now a witness. Witnesses talked, so they had to kill him. The best he could do was buy more time.

“I’m waiting,” she said impatiently.

“I don’t know exactly what the scam is. But I can catch them.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“It takes one to know one.”

“Instincts, huh?”

“I know how they think.”

“You’d better not be fucking with me.”

“I’m not fucking with you.”

Shaz made a call on her cell phone. “Hey, Marcus. He wants to cut a deal with us.” She listened intently before ending the call.

“Marcus wants him to see the film,” she told the punishers. “Hold him down.”

T-Bird dropped to the floor behind Billy’s chair, and put their prisoner into a half nelson. Shaz powered up the room’s flat-screen TV. A snuff film of Ricky Boswell began to play. She grabbed Billy by the hair and pulled his head back, forcing his eyes to stay open.

“Watch this. Learn,” she said.

Billy didn’t think he could learn anything from watching a poor guy get beaten to death, but he was wrong. The punishers were nothing more than bit players, while Shaz was the real star in the horror show. With cold sweat pouring down his face, he watched her break Ricky’s toes and snip off his fingers and finally swing the baseball bat that popped Ricky’s eye out of his head.

The poor kid was alive for all of it. To his credit, Ricky stuck to the code of never betraying the people he ran with. His family would have been proud of him for doing that.

The beating finally ended. Ricky had taken everything a man could possibly take. He was laid on the bed and started to die, his body a quivering mass of ticks and tremors as his life seeped away. His good eye blinked like the emergency blinker on a car, then grew frozen.

Billy could not help it and started to cry.

“Let him go,” Shaz said.

T-Bird released Billy. The young hustler wiped away his tears.

“Get up,” she said. “We’re going upstairs to see Marcus.”

He rose on shaky legs. He was never going to forget this for as long as he lived. He started to follow her out of the bedroom, then froze. On the TV screen, a stranger had entered the picture and moved next to the bed. The stranger brought his hand to his chin, as if trying to decide how to dispose of the body, and offered his profile to the camera.

The breath caught in Billy’s throat. It was his old pal Crunchie.

Riding an elevator to the penthouse, Billy thought back to his meeting at the Peppermill with the old grifter. Crunchie had been throwing off bad vibes, which Billy had ignored, too swayed by the lure of a huge score to realize he was being set up.

The doors parted, and they walked down a carpeted hallway to a corner office with a gold nameplate that read, “Marcus Doucette, President & CEO / Galaxy Entertainment.” Doucette’s name had been in the papers lately. A sleazoid strip-club owner from LA, he’d broken every building code and bribed a building inspector to get his casino built. Money talked in the desert, and the joint had opened on time.

Shaz opened the doors and they entered. The office was sleek and soulless, with as much charm as a terminal at McCarran. Neon bursts from the Strip’s casinos danced in the floor-to-ceiling windows, bathing the room in lurid hues. An oversized granite desk sat in the room’s center, in front of it, a single chair. Two men stood outside on the balcony, talking.

“Have a seat,” Shaz said.

He did as told. A framed wedding photo on the desk caught his eye. In it, Shaz and a handsome devil with burnt-blond hair and soap opera blue eyes stood on a sandy beach, exchanging wedding vows. So she was married to the boss.

The men on the balcony came inside. Doucette sat on the edge of the desk and fired up a cigarette. He favored the movie-studio-executive look and wore a cream-colored Armani suit, an unbuttoned white silk shirt, and crocodile loafers sans socks.

“Crunchie tells me you’re the smartest cheater in town,” Doucette said.

Crunchie stood by the slider, cowboy hat in hand.

“You’re a piece of shit,” Billy said.

“Shut up, and listen to Marcus,” the old grifter said.

“I want you to tell me what these Gypsies are up to,” Doucette said. “Do that, and you’ll walk out of here with your skin. Fair enough?”

It was as good as Billy could have hoped for, and he decided to play his hand. “I found some information on Ricky Boswell’s cell phone that told me his family’s planning to scam your casino on Saturday afternoon during the shift change. They’re going to do a little hocus-pocus in the middle of the casino floor and rig one of your games. Your security guards will be watching, and so will the eye-in-the sky, but you still won’t see them.”